Tag: Shiites

Shiite militias in Iraq have changed the name of their current campaign to take Ramadi from Islamic State from “I am here, O Husayn” to “I am here, O Iraq,” since the former could have been interpreted as a sign of sectarianism.

A suicide bomber with a concealed weapon detonated his payload during Friday prayers at the Ali b. Abi Talib Mosque in Qadif, a suburb of the major Shiite city of Qatif in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia.

Shiite militias in Iraq, joined by some Sunni tribal levies, on Tuesday reached a university campus just to the southwest of Ramadi in what is called a “shaping operation” intended to set the stage for an all-out assault.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haydar al-Abadi met Tuesday with leaders of the Shiite militias to plan the retaking of Ramadi, a Sunni Arab city about 78 miles due west of Baghdad that fell on Sunday to the Islamic State group.

The pan-Arab London daily al-Sharq al-Awsat [The Middle East] is reporting from a source inside the new Iraqi government that former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, now one of three largely symbolic vice presidents, is attempting to undermine his successor, Haider al-Abadi.

“Until this part of the world,” the “Daily Show” host explains, “starts to see past sectarian lines and national borders that, OK, we drew—we’ll give you that—the U.S. can’t fix this ... by waving a magic bomb.”

If prime minister-designate Haidar al-Abadi in Iraq is to hope to defeat the so-called Islamic State (actually a kind of mafia made up of serial murderers and marauders), he must find a way to reincorporate Iraq’s Sunni Arabs into the government.

Arguably, the so-called Islamic State (actually a vicious gang of serial killers) could never have taken over northern and western Iraq if the largely Sunni Arab populations there had not been deeply alienated from the government in Baghdad by the openly sectarian politics of former Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

A New York Times article glimpses America’s role in creating the leader of ISIS—the violent Islamic group “redraw[ing] the map of the Middle East”—and confirms the line by English poet W.H. Auden: “Those to whom evil is done do evil in return.”

Despite the Iraqi parliament’s failure to reach a quorum on Tuesday, in a clear slap in the face to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and other incumbents running for another term, on Friday Mr. al-Maliki insisted that he remains a candidate for a third term as prime minister.

The British Pathé archive gives us an opportunity to resist historical forgetting and know a modernizing Iraq that was prouder and more self-determined than the hothouse of anxiety and ruin that latter-20th century U.S. aggression made it today.

Sunni insurgents are not only in a struggle against what they see as oppression by a largely Shiite government in Baghdad and its security forces, but also over who will control and benefit from what Nouri al-Maliki—speaking for most of his constituents—told The Wall Street Journal is Iraq’s “national patrimony.”

Secretary of State John Kerry is an experienced and knowledgeable diplomat, but the difficulty of the situation in the Middle East right now is demonstrated by the repeated reversals he suffered during his trip to the Middle East.

The breakdown in Iraq means that “the Middle East map—defined by European powers a century ago—may be redrawn, either de facto or formally,” regional expert Robin Wright writes at The New Yorker. And “globally, the jihadist threat has never been greater.”

Gunmen killed an anti-terrorism policeman and his family in Baghdad on Saturday; kidnappers abducted eight policemen on a highway to Jordan and Syria; and attackers shot dead a Sunni cleric in the country’s Shiite-majority south.

Want to know some of the main reasons Hezbollah commands so much respect in Lebanon? “They cover medical bills, offer health insurance, pay school fees and make seed money available for small businesses. They are invisible but omnipresent, providing essential services that the Lebanese government through years of war was incapable of offering.”

After insurgents bomb one of the holiest Shiite shrines in Iraq, at least 138 die in reprisal battles —marking the worst Shiite-on-Sunni violence since the outbreak of the Iraq war. University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole calls the day “apocalyptic.”

The largely ineffectual interim leader is now set to take formal control of the country. He is backed by theocratic Shiites in Iran and the rabidly anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr in Iraq. A theocratic state, virulently hostile to U.S. interests? Right now Ahmad Chalabi is almost starting to look good in comparison. | story

The parliamentary results are confirmed: Shiites will dominate both the Sunnis and the Kurds in Iraq. So while the U.S. tries to intimidate Iran over its nukes, Iranian-bred theocratic Shiites—those most hostile to our interests—are in the ascendancy in Iraq. So much for the neocons’ “Field of Dreams” scenario for creating democracy in Iraq: “If you break it, they will come.” | story

Also, read Juan Cole on how Bush created a theocracy in Iraq. | column

Update: A former Pentagon analyst is sentenced to 12 years-plus for leaking confidential documents in an attempt to get the U.S. to take the threat of Iran more seriously. | storyUpdate No. 2: Iran and Iraq are already linking arms on the construction of electricity facilities.